Women at Work in the Deuteronomistic History

Written by Mercedes L. García Bachmann Reviewed By Jeffrey G. Audirsch

Mercedes L. García Bachmann is Professor of Old Testament at the Instituto Universitario ISEDET in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She specializes in Pentateuchal and Deuteronomistic History (i.e., Joshua–Kings) as well as feminist hermeneutics. Additionally, Bachmann has authored several articles in both English and Spanish.

The present book is a revision of Bachmann’s 1999 doctoral dissertation completed at Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, Illinois. The book covers a wide range of topics related to women laborers in the ancient Near East (ANE) and biblical texts, particularly from the Deuteronomistic History. She divides her work into an introduction and eight chapters.

In the introduction, Bachmann provides an overview of women in the Hebrew Bible. At the heart of her research is an emphasis on women who “perform some task and immediately vanish from the story” (p. 2). The controlling presupposition for the book is that the biblical authors highlight male urban elites while marginalizing the working class, particularly women laborers. Furthermore, she suggests that Israelite society contained sub-cultures of power whose values often violated weaker sub-cultures. Thus, Bachmann maintains that various societal injustices occurred when the ideology of upper-class men made demands upon lower-class women: “At a time when society starts to recognize that women carry a heavier economic and social burden than men do, that women do not share equally in decision making, and that women are all too often subject to violence and humiliation, theology is called to take up those it has so far forgotten” (p. 15). Bachmann uses the remainder of the book to substantiate this claim.

The methodology of studying women laborers is the focus of chapter 1. Bachmann describes her methodology as an exegetical approach that combines socio-historical, ideological, and feminist criticisms (pp. 17–18, 46). Attention is given primarily to the Deuteronomistic History because of the extensive narratives yielding “a sample of terms [for women laborers] inserted in believable contexts” (p. 23).

Chapter 2 is a history of research that examines a variety of approaches to lower-class women: feminist/gender studies, biblical studies, social-scientific studies, studies on labor, and studies on slave, semi-free, and “unfree” workers (pp. 57–78). By Bachmann’s own admission, the sub-categories examined are not all treated equally or successfully. Thus the reader is left dissatisfied in several areas, a verdict conceded by Bachmann when she attributes her lack of research to insufficient funds for interlibrary loan articles and limitations on the availability of Internet resources (p. 78).

With chapter 3, Bachmann surveys socio-economic conditions within the ANE. She accomplishes this in two parts: an overview of characteristics within agrarian societies and an analysis of themes related to slavery and indentured servitude. With regard to agrarian societies, she concludes that family households, urban centers, the rise of labor forces, and the establishment of a state worked together to enforce a “hierarchy within the hierarchy,” each with their own set of social mores (p. 90).

The next chapter discusses women with unknown occupations who were subjugated to a master. Chapter 4 is divided into two sections, the first focusing on female slavery in the Hebrew Bible (i.e., indentured servants, dependent women without paternal protection, and captive women), while the second studies the use of ‘mh and špḥh (two Hebrew synonyms for “maid”) as an ideological debasement of one’s honor. Similarly in chapter 5, miscellaneous women laborers are the focal point. Bachmann discusses several community roles dominated by women: midwifery, nourishing children and animals, making tools, manufacturing textiles, making music, and bartering.

Chapters 6 and 7 are somewhat related to one another for highlighting dependent women with specific roles in Israelite institutions. In the former chapter, emphasis is given to the occupations of women within the royal household as recorded in the Deuteronomistic History. The research is guided by the questions: “What is the social location of X?,” “How is she portrayed” by the Deuteronomist?, and “How much can be known about her occupation?” (p. 237). In the latter chapter, Bachmann identifies the role of prostitutes and sex workers in the ANE, non-Deuteronomic books, and the Deuteronomistic History. Chapter 8 functions as a conclusion to the book by reassessing the social location of female labor in the Deuteronomistic History.

In sum, Bachmann seeks to bring attention to women laborers through a multifaceted methodology. Throughout most of the first five chapters, Bachmann summarizes and repackages information gleaned from other social-scientific and feminist works which address women laborers in the Hebrew Bible. Despite the title of the book, women laborers in the Deuteronomistic History do not actually take center stage until chapters 6–7. Even as she states her preference for the Deuteronomistic History due to its “believable contents” over and against the putatively fragmented Pentateuchal texts, the irony is that Bachmann devotes ample space to discussing women laborers within the Pentateuch—precisely the section of the Hebrew Bible she deems unsuitable for her research parameters (p. 23).

Many evangelicals generally view the methods employed in Bachmann’s work as secondary or tertiary for study of the Hebrew Bible. This highlights the need for evangelicals to engage these methods, but unfortunately, she is not successful in consistently balancing exegetical work with socio-historical, ideological, and feminist criticisms. Thus her work will not garner support among evangelicals for the methods that she utilizes. Moreover, her methodological focus on women laborers insinuates that the biblical authors heightened the degree of separation between elite, patriarchal society and lower class women laborers. Although she never explicitly states that the biblical authors were misogynists, there are hints of such a view in her emphasis on obscure and overlooked women as opposed to elites within the Hebrew Bible.

Even with these weaknesses, Bachmann brings to the forefront insights generally overlooked by most scholars of Deuteronomistic History (see chs. 6–7). Her study of specific texts with women laborers (e.g., Rahab in Joshua 2) reveals valuable sociological and ideological aspects of the lower class within ancient Israel as portrayed in the Deuteronomistic History. It is in this vein that Bachmann adds to the growing body of research into the roles of women in the Hebrew Bible, especially the Deuteronomistic History. From a methodological perspective, however, other works can provide better examples of interdisciplinary study of the Hebrew Bible (e.g., Thomas B. Dozeman, ed., Methods for Exodus [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010]).


Jeffrey G. Audirsch

Jeffrey G. Audirsch
Shorter University
Rome, Georgia, USA

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